Saturday, November 21, 2015

Minneapolis, Black Lives Matter, and the Failures of American Urban Policy

Minneapolis is a microcosm for urban
America. Especially so when it comes to
failed urban policy. The confrontation
and controversy between its police and people of color provide a case study for much of what is
wrong in how America responded to the race riots of the 1960s, opting instead
to adopt a militaristic approach to urban poverty and racism as opposed to
seeing the roots in a lack of economic opportunity and inequality.

Urban American burned with racism
and poverty in the summer of 1967.
Across the country from Newark to Watts race riots gripped America as
African-Americans protested discrimination.
Minneapolis was no exception. In
response, President Johnson convened a study of the causes of these riots,
asking too for policy recommendations.
The National Advisory Commission
on Civil Disorders, better known as the Kerner Commission, declared that along
with frustrated hopes surrounding the unfulfilled promises of the civil rights
laws:

White
racism is essentially responsible for the explosive mixture which has been

accumulating
in our cities since the end of World War II. Among the ingredients of this
mixture are:

*
Pervasive discrimination and segregation in employment, education and housing,
which have resulted in the continuing exclusion of great numbers of Negroes
from the benefits of economic progress.

*
Black in-migration and white exodus, .which have produced the massive and
growing concentrations of impoverished Negroes in our major cities, creating a
growing crisis of deteriorating facilities and services and unmet human needs.

*
The black ghettos where segregation and poverty converge on the young to
destroy

bitterness
and resentment against society in general and white society in particular are
the result.

The Kerner
Commission called for the enactment of comprehensive and enforceable federal
open housing laws, placing low and moderate income housing outside of ghetto
areas, and building six million new and existing units of decent housing.
Instead of taking this approach that treated urban unrest as one rooted in
racism and poverty, the response instead was twofold. First, the Omnibus Crime Control and Safe
Streets Act of 1968 defined the riots as a problem of law and order, ushering
in the gradual militarization of policing in urban areas, especially as a
result of the Nixon-Reagan war on drugs and then with Bill Clinton treating the
crime spike of the 1990s with the placing of 100,000 more police of the streets
and increasing prison sentences for many offenders, most of whom happened to be
African-American males living in segregated concentrated poverty neighborhoods.

Second, in 1969 while serving as
Nixon’s urban affairs adviser, Daniel Patrick Moynihan sent the President a
memo suggesting: “The time may have come when the issue of race could benefit
from a period of 'benign neglect.”
Effectively with this memo the second civil rights revolution was coming
to an end in America. The Great Society
programs meant to address poverty were scaled back, culminating with Clinton
signing a 1996 law reforming welfare.
Race in general came to be ignored as an issue to be addressed with
anything more than laws declaring America to be a color-blind society.

Fifty years later, the failures to
responded adequately to the problems the Kerner Commission originally
described, and the path that instead was taken, is where America is now,
including Minneapolis. Since 1967 Minneapolis
has failed to desegregate is schools and neighborhoods, it has persistent
problems of poverty and concentrated poverty, and mayors have repeatedly put
downtown development ahead of promoting
economic opportunity in the neighborhoods.
And now one can see how the militarized approach to crime and disorder
pits the police against communities of color, precipitating the confrontations
in Minneapolis and across the country.

Black Lives Matters’ demands seek to
reset the clock, placing America back in a place similar to where the country
was in 1967. Instead of responding to
racism and poverty with bullets and neglect, BLM calls for both
demilitarization of policing and social justice. Whether this time Minneapolis, Minnesota, or
the United States will respond correctly is yet to be seen. And whether the tactics of BLM, which too
seem to mimic those used fifty years ago
and which failed to make racism and social justice the core policy issues, will
work this time, too are yet to be seen.

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About Me

Professor in the political science department at Hamline University where he teaches classes in American politics, public policy and administration, and ethics.
Schultz holds an appointment at the University of Minnesota law school and teaches election law, state constitutional law, and professional responsibility.
He has authored/edited 30 books, 12 legal treatises, and more than 100 articles on topics including civil service reform, election law, eminent domain, constitutional law, public policy, legal and political theory, and the media and politics.
In addition to 25+ years teaching, he has worked in government as a director of code enforcement and for a community action agency as an economic and housing planner.